Got Voice?

When I began writing stuff as a teen, the muse would often gift me with the first (or occasionally, the last) sentence of a story or article. It may or may not have been about an idea I was contemplating, yet the words would appear magically, in perfect cadence. This alone could catapult me through the resulting sentences until I completed the work. Sometimes the stuff was good, sometimes not, but the first sentence was always right.

As my skills matured, I created more ambitious writing projects for myself, fiddling around with endings and middles and bullet points and characters, yet still found these separate components drifting in the ozone until the arrival of that glorious first sentence, at which point they would coalesce into a dramatic whole.

As a teen I instinctively realized that this opening enchantment set the piece’s tone and expectations, yet it was only recently that I understood it was actually (the literary term) Voice I was experiencing.

What Do You Hear?

We are each given a unique, God-given perspective to apply to life. The best authors (and musicians and artists) convey that perspective into their work by revealing their Voice. Voice is the ultimate creative intangible, the writer’s signature style simmering with hidden values, wit and wordplay, charm, steely logic, and authenticate emotions.

The Originals resonate and can’t be duplicated, though they are often copied. The Greats meld Voice with refined qualities (insight, talent, sharper use of the artistic tools), while the Immortals combine all this with inspired risk-taking to create singular works within their field. Voice is the essential element in all of this.

The easiest high school lit examples are Faulkner and Hemingway; though most people focus on their differing uses of language, their choice of words is evidence of their individual Voices as the language came after they had discovered their personal creative riverhead.
For Immortal (and even Great) Voices, other deficiencies are forgivable. Two quick examples:

• Hemingway moaned that Dostoyevsky couldn’t write, yet the Russian’s novels unaccountably moved him. They are still considered the most acute psychological fiction in the Western canon.
• Shakespeare’s language veils plot holes, character inconsistencies, and unrealistic parallels. (Would two prominent families actually be going through near-identical family crises as they do in King Lear?) Everyone still focuses on the overripe language.

If you’re trying to write, but after practice, study, and informed instruction find the words still lie limp on the page, it’s because you’re lacking Voice. Keep trying.

Apostolics: As in Writing, So in Music
One reason so many Apostolic artistic efforts are so often mediocre is the individual vision for each work is non-existent. There is no compelling Voice within the writer that believes in its artistic importance, just an urge to write something, “to minister,” as if that were enough.

I mean honestly, when’s the last time you read an Apostolic (non-doctrinal) anything and said, “That’s an important article” or “This book will live beyond my lifetime”? Do we ever open any Apostolic book or magazine, ninetyandnine.com included, and anticipate something powerful enough to rearrange our thinking or even the direction of the Apostolic movement? If not, aren’t we just applauding mediocrity?

It’s time we stopped settling for prairie romances and instead honed our Voices to reach some level of excellence. We must raise our creative ambitions to be godly influencers on our surrounding culture, not just Pentecostals. We must be willing to put in the hard work to make our Voice remarkable, for the more remarkable our Voice, the easier it will be to share God with everyone. Of course, the opposite is also true.

Always End with a Story

An established critic recently declared he never read more than 5 pages of any book until he was sure the writer’s Voice was distinctive enough to be remembered long after the book was finished. Otherwise, no matter how exciting the content, it wasn’t worth his time.

I think he’s right.

Because a written work takes so much more than a perfect first sentence, but it’s the perfect first sentence that frees the Voice to change the world.